I read rave reviews about Sweet Home for the Famicom (Japan's NES) and heard it was the precursor to Resident Evil. So I ordered a copy via ebay. I order a lot of Japanese games and most are usually in English. If nothing else I figured with my Retro Freak/Retron 5 I could change the region setting to get it to display English. Apparently that is not the case!

Looks like I'm stuck with a cart I can't use. It looks like my best bet might be to buy one of the reproductions available, which I assume would be in English? Please advise.

Very few if any Famicom games are in English, but there are plenty of English reproduction NES carts for Sweet Home floating around online. You should probably point out in the review that it's an unofficial translation.

(And FYI if you're looking for another great game for Halloween, check out Splatterhouse for the Famicom. You can get an NES repro cart on the site I linked to, but you could also just get the Famicom version as there's no need for a translation).